


Contrapasso

by Weconqueratdawn



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Diary/Journal, Hannibal is doomed, Hannibal's Very Secret Diary, M/M, Memory Palace Weirdness, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Ravage Anthology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 15:09:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21273221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Weconqueratdawn/pseuds/Weconqueratdawn
Summary: Long after the fall and safely hidden in rural Argentina, Hannibal reviews his memories of his early days with Will. But in his memory palace all is not as it should be - something is growing there and the walls are starting to crumble. What - or who - could be the cause?Written for the Ravage Fanthology.





	Contrapasso

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to fragile-teacup for beta and to the ever-excellent LoveCrimeBooks for putting this in print <3
> 
> This fic is a sort-of companion piece to the one which appeared in Radiance - it's not at all necessary to read it first but if you'd like to [you can find it here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13091895).
> 
> And just in case you're not familiar with Ravage, it's a Dante-themed Hannibal anthology organised around the Inferno. This fic appears in the first section of the book, _Vestibule_ \- the entrance to hell.

_**Chascomús, Buenos Aires Province**_  
**_Thursday, 17th February_**  


Last night we had thunderstorms; W. - of course - got out of bed to watch. He stood by the window, rain sheeting down the glass, drenched in its reflection. He watched the storm; I watched him. How little things change, despite appearances.

This morning he has gone to the lake and I find myself with a similar need for tranquility. The storm has passed, the sky is pale and clean; common metaphor would have us revere it as a new and hopeful day. But there is a mournful tinge to the light - it is yellowed, cracked like varnish; the air possesses the quality of a memory long unremembered. The past intrudes, as it is wont to do.

The kitchen here is of a modest size but well-equipped. Before I began this entry, I spent the early hours there. The ingredients were not the most therapeutic kind - we live very much alone, as W. wishes it - but cookery is still a deep and satisfying pleasure. Tonight, W. will return - we will sit, eat, talk together. Afterwards, we will go to bed. It will be everything and it will be nothing; it is simply how we live since we left Costa Rica behind. 

But even before, it wasn’t so different. What has changed is, at heart, minimal. The gaps between us are narrower, less policed. We may share a landscape of physical intimacy but our language is the same. Though our knowledge of each other has grown, we have returned in spirit to the early days of our friendship.

I think, now, of that first meeting. And of the ones which came after; the unwilling ease with which he let me in, after a lifetime of retreat. My delight was complete; a fine unravelling of delectable threads, one spool at a time. My aim was to guide; to show him the path not yet taken. I had no thoughts for my own, nor that I might find a guide in him.

Today’s strange light echoes with the light of those days. A melancholy Baltimore fall; a little house in the woods. A fevered sweetness and a surrogate daughter. It brings to mind both the before and the after; where I began and the places through which I later travelled.

_ **Friday, 18th February** _

As W. slept, I stayed awake to visit my palace. The rooms of our earliest days were constructed long ago and I enter them rarely. It has been years since I needed to and, if I were to go looking, I would not find him there. He is not easily confined - even in my mind, he wanders where he pleases.

Last night, I found my memories curiously static. Nothing more than a collection of clippings, a hasty scrapbook. I believed I had preserved them with more care - at the time, I had been conscious of their importance, or so I had thought.

Reconstruction was necessary. I began with my old waiting room; it shares lesser associations, of course, but W. has conquered where other patients first trod. His restless discomfort, his compulsion to press the very matters from which his mind recoiled, have crowded out the rest.

I used to savour the pause before his appointments; an interlude to swill away the mundanity of the day and to anticipate what was to come. Better still if he were already outside, waiting with resignation rather than genuine patience; agitation building, until he could enter and unburden himself.

With these thoughts in mind, I enhanced and rebuilt. I gave life and movement to the words he’d spoken; his fears, his slow undoing at my hands. Precious memories, all of them; bursting with beauty and suffering. The room began to echo with his presence; it imbued the walls, the floor, the objects within. I breathed him in, immersed. But it was only when my thoughts turned to the adjoining room - the little house in Wolf Trap - that he appeared at my side.

Given the nature of my task, I had expected him earlier. He wore a thin, plain shirt he’d been fond of in Costa Rica; pale blue linen, with dark slacks. His feathered dream-wings were poised for flight.

“I’m curious,” he said, “what has precipitated this sudden renovation. Our past is a tangled wood - the more order you give it, the less truth it will have.”

He regarded me steadily before turning his back, examining instead the _Suzumi no hotaru_ triptych hanging on the far wall. 

“Everything is underpinned by order,” I told him. “Even hell itself. Chaos is part of God’s design; one cannot exist without the other.”

His wings twitched, rustling like silk. He faced me with a smile and said, “In chaos we find change.” 

And then he walked away, through an arched entrance which opened in the wall. Wordlessly, I watched him pass into the darkness beyond.

_ **Monday, 21st February ** _

Traditions stick, especially without good reason to discard them. The leisure hours of the weekend are ones we continue to observe, despite having no working week to speak of. Our actions are less intent and more languid; pleasure and relaxation are our goals and we excel at them.

Over this last weekend, we visited a market - W. befriended the Labrador cross belonging to a stall owner while I purchased cured meats - and later we opened a bottle of Firmado to drink by the pool. Sunday brought a fresher breeze than of late; we celebrated the dip in temperature with an afternoon of unhurried lovemaking. 

I am always pleasantly surprised by the difference a good fuck makes to W. Sometimes I am inclined to doubt that his hunger matches mine; but in the act itself it crawls out from its hiding place, raw and ravenous. He is rarely more delightful.

In my less idle moments, instead of adding to this journal, I sketched. Mostly scenes of W. I drew him dining at my table, seated during therapy, seizing in my office. Then I moved on to imagined scenes: bloody in the kitchen in Cuba; triumphant with his firefly-man, glittering with broken bottles of Lecter Dvaras wine.

I wondered if that was when his wings had first emerged, and naturally moved onto sketching the dream he had described to me. They were dark, like a raven’s, and heavy; a gift of flight and burden both.

Once, I pressed upon him the image of Saint Michael. A therapeutic suggestion only - Christian art is so helpful that way. But no, his dream was the last step along his journey, wings representing the core of him and acceptance of all that meant: speed, protectiveness, power. And violence. I drew him this way; framed, it hangs in his dressing room, so I know he understands this, too.

His wings are his culmination, therefore my guidance is at an end. From here, we travel onwards together; equal in thought, in spirit, and in heart.

_ **Evening of Monday, 21st February** _

My earlier reminiscences led me down a romantic path, one which became passionate as evening crept in. I am fresh from our bed, from his body, writing this while W. showers and fetches us a nightcap.

The house is in darkness; we inhabit it like nocturnal beasts, alive to every rustling leaf. I listen to his movements; water running, a pause while he reaches for the towel. I cannot hear his feet on the tiles but I know the sound by heart. The door is opening; he will take the stairs (they will creak on the ninth step) and then there will come the chiming of bottles as he chooses between another Malbec and something stronger.

Being a lover is not new to me. Neither are the pains of the heart; though they are, I will admit, far rarer. Intimacies have taught me much; how to listen for cues to others’ needs and how to respond. How to plant desires and to feed them; and then to watch my seedlings sprout, into acts of unknown magnitude and force. 

My education has been thorough and it has served me well. But still I am left wondering at what W. has planted in me.

_ **Tuesday, 22nd February** _

Unusually, I awoke late and to an empty bed. There was a glass of iced coffee on the nightstand, a note - now damp - trapped beneath it.

‘_Gone for a walk_,’ it read. ‘_Tried to wake you but couldn’t. Might be back before you’ve finished your coffee.’_

I carried the coffee downstairs and drank it sitting in the low seat by the window. I am still drinking it now. Outside is the plain lawned garden facing the road, and the path to the front gate. Beyond that is the lake. Though it is equally possible that W. has gone to explore the woods behind us, I am content to wait here.

It is now just past 9am and I must think of breakfast - something hearty is called for. The evenings are still hot and our meals lighter than usual, so extra sustenance is needed. There are some chops left over from the weekend and a piece of light rye sourdough. Perhaps the bread could be fried in the pork fat, with a few slices of porcini... 

The mushrooms are soaking and I have returned to my coffee. W. has not yet arrived back.

Sharing breakfast with a lover - or any significant other - is a beautiful act; one almost as intimate as that which preceded it. I learned early that many prefer to avoid it - it reveals much and indicates an attachment that one may not wish to admit to, or indeed even feel. I have never been so minded - when I play my appointed role, I care not for such reticence. I always wished to enjoy it fully, and to demonstrate all the expected courtesies, so I did.

And I believe I did enjoy it fully; I shared enough even though I did not share all. Most, of course, refused to see what was in front of them (though some were harder to deceive than others). Very few chose to look beneath my carefully-crafted surface - very few did I ever wish to.

My present is differently drawn: I am no longer unseen. This has wrought all kinds of change, within and without, permitted and unpermitted.

I can admit that, now. 

…

He returned and we ate our breakfast by the window. His walk had left him in good spirits; his smile, light and savage, worked a slow violence upon my own.

It always does.

_ **Wednesday, 23rd February** _

There is a truth I can no longer avoid and I must confess it here: when I look forward, into our futures, I am faced with a blank.

My looking has so far all been backwards; it is the only direction I seem able to face. If I turn around, to seek opportunities for forward motion, I am prevented. The way is hidden by a thick veil of darkness; a fog. I can make nothing out, and am left only to presume that what awaits me is yet more of my present.

Has time stopped? Will it eventually reverse? Will my present unravel, become undone, and if so will I lose what I have gained? Or perhaps, should we both go round again, I will gain this and more.

Now that we are here, in this particular present, I wonder about what I wish for. And, as I do, I watch W. at work. There is a problem with the plumbing upstairs and he is looking for something missing from his toolbox. He finds it and goes back up, only to come down again to check the water pressure in the kitchen (unsatisfactory). He frowns, scratches his head, leaves. The faucet is still running.

What is there to wish for? There are books and conversations and walks, boating on the lake. We take trips and explore new places. Of the last of these, I remember his smiling white teeth and sun-warmed skin. His ease is new; another small victory. There are my monthly excursions to the theatres and galleries of Buenos Aires. What else?

There is more; I know there is. The thing he planted in me; I feel it stirring.

_ **Thursday, 24th February** _

It is quiet this evening. W. is reading outside, moths fluttering pale in the artificial light. He is comfortably occupied and I can meditate upon his still form as I write this entry.

After this afternoon’s siesta, I reassessed the adjustments I had made to my palace. It seemed to me a great improvement. I was admiring a moment of W.’s tired desperation - embodied in the fly-tying kit he had purchased for Abigail - when I felt a void open behind me. The sensation was unusual, akin to a gust of wind bursting a door free of its latch. 

I turned; there stood W., his wings darkly impressive. He was leaning against the stone column of an open archway, the one I had seen him pass through before.

He stirred as I stepped closer. A soft breeze whispered through the arch. It carried with it the mineral tang of old, damp stone; limestone, perhaps.

“What is this?” I asked him. “I have no recollection of placing it here.”

“That’s because you didn’t,” he said. “I did.”

He stood aside and allowed me to examine it. I had - and still have - no memory of encountering this particular arch before; it seemed unremarkable. Simply-carved stone blocks, lightly pitted with age, unmarked by anything of significance. I concluded that the arch was a basic archetype, rather than a specific example.

“Its origins must lie with you, not me,” I said. “But I do not remember which of our conversations it has sprung from.”

W. shook his head, smiling. He came to my side and we both gazed at the arch, and into the impenetrable darkness on the other side.

“I thought you’d recognise it,” he said. “You’ve been this way many times before.”

I felt, then, something unfamiliar; a prickle of foreboding. And I was aware of another sensation; one which occurs when I contemplate the places in my palace where I do not wish to tread.

“Can I ask why it is here?” I said to W. “In this particular room?”

We both turned to survey the waiting room around us. All was pristine; the furniture, the paintings, the pale Persian rug on the floor.

W. shrugged. “Because it separates the before and the after,” he said. “This is the before. And the arch leads to everything which comes after.”

He was both nonchalant and provoking; as lifelike as could possibly be. I laughed.

“You are deviating from your script,” I said. “This sounds very much like creating order where you said chaos belonged.”

He smiled again. “But you don’t know what’s through the arch.”

This caused me some genuine concern. Because this is _my _palace. Because he was right: I did _not_ know what was through the arch.

I frowned at him. “You said I’d been here before.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then why can’t I remember?”

“It looks different each time,” he said. “Once, it was a set of iron gates, opening onto a grand drive. Another time, it was a barn door. Later, it was stainless steel and wipe-clean. It’s had many guises.”

I paused and watched him - the way he held his head, the smirk lurking at the corners of his lips. I knew what he would say next.

“I have been contemplating time,” I told him. “There is a strange quality to our present; I can only look back, not forward. Now I know why.”

I made to stride through the arch; he grabbed my arm and would not let me pass. He was strong, stronger than was physically possible. I could not shake him off.

“Not yet,” he said. “I cannot let you go until you understand. It is not like before; the meaning is new. It is hard for you.”

He released me, and came close. His manner was gentle, persuasive. 

“We share rooms,” he said. “The arch is mine. You created it for me and now I have shared it with you. It is uniquely ours.”

“Ours,” I said, and looked at it again. Still it offered no clues. “So what must I do?”

“You must cease trying,” he said. “Abandon your hopes and desires; let the dark waters take you.”

Writing this, I still do not understand. But I do know that the hold he has over me is shocking; it could drown me. Should I let it?

It is disquieting, knowing I have lost control of my palace.

_ **Saturday, 25th February** _

Yesterday, I pondered the issue at length. I even considered questioning W. to ascertain whether he knew of the arch, in case he could tell me something of its origins. 

I rejected the idea. The W. in my palace is lifelike but he is not my W. He is a construct only; the things he tells me I must already know.

_ **Monday, 27th February** _

The weekend was delightful; sunshine like honey, W. lazy-limbed by the pool. The only sounds were the wind in the trees and the occasional shout from a boat, carried by the breeze across the lake. 

I left my problem to simmer unattended; when my present looks like this, why should I be anxious to seek a future I cannot see?

We cooked together and ate together. I was deboning a chicken and W. said _show me_, so I did. He has bursts of enthusiasm for learning the culinary arts, which last only as long as a summer storm. I teach him the same things over and over again; both of us enjoy it more this way and neither of us will tire of our game for some time yet.

I cannot get enough of him, nor of his body. I think he is more surprised at himself than at me. He is not used to being desired, nor to encouraging desire. He courts it, sometimes subconsciously, sometimes not. This last time he was not subtle; the press of his weight into mine, the touch of his fingers on my wrist, the directness of his gaze.

He led me to bed. The room was mellow with light; it painted his flanks gold, rippled silk across his shoulders. His mouth begged to be kissed; his hips demanded. I complied with his every wish and, at his climax, saw the shadow of wings spread wide upon the wall.

The silence afterwards was soft as velvet. I broke it to ask him about the future; I wondered if he had a vision of it, and whether that might illuminate what is still dark to me.

He frowned and turned onto his back, hair curled dark against the pillow. “I don’t know,” he said. “I had one, all planned out. I had many. But they couldn’t come to pass; you just wouldn’t let me go.”

“And neither would you,” I said. “We both chose the water. And now we are here.”

He paused for a long time before he spoke again. “There are two possible futures I can see. We either stay like this, bothering no one but ourselves, or the opposite. The first choice means a long, quiet retirement. The other…” He turned his head and looked at me. “There’s only one way that will end. And it’s not in retirement nor together.”

“We are indeed a volatile combination,” I agreed. “Will you choose based on the likely outcome or on your needs and desires?”

His gaze held me. “The only needs and desires I have are serviced by our present,” he said. “What about you? Do you desire more?”

“Sometimes I think so,” I said. “And sometimes not.”

“There’s no middle ground,” he said. “You’re going to have to decide.”

I considered this, and as I did, moved further into his warmth. His scent was strong, lulling. I associate it with sleep, sex; with incurable hunger.

“Tell me about the first choice,” I said. “I can’t picture it. All I can see is today, not beyond.”

He rolled onto his side to face me, open curiosity in his expression. “That’s because it looks like today,” he said. “A long string of todays, until one of us dies. The house and surroundings might change; everything else will be the same.”

I frowned, struck by the choice before me. And I knew, in that moment, what I wished for and how contradictory my desires were. To have my W. and keep him, I must give up much.

He caught my expression and understood it too well. He smile turned sharp, amused by my distress.

“What do you say, Dr. Lecter?” he said. “Can I provide you with enough entertainment to last? Or through me do you pass into the city of woe?”

_ **Tuesday, 28th February** _

He has gone out sailing, now that the lake is quiet. I declined accompanying him. I wanted to think.

I spent the morning composing; it is very restful and useful for problem-solving. The active parts of the mind are engaged, yet my thoughts are free to wander.

Half of mine drifted with W., out on his boat. I never could escape him; what is known can never be unknown.

I have made my choice.

There is air flowing through my palace, as if from an open window. Cracks have appeared in some of the walls; the floor of my office is now rent in two. It could all be rebuilt, but I realise now that my palace is no longer required. Its upkeep is a matter of vanity only; it has no practical purpose except for my own idle amusement. 

He has changed so much. Will his power ever stop growing?

He is waiting for me by the arch, sanguine. Together we will pass through into what lies beyond.

I understand. And he was right; it is hard.

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this, either here or in the book! Feel free to let me know if so <3
> 
> *
> 
> [I'm on tumblr](http://weconqueratdawn.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/weconqueratdawn) (and very occasionally on [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/weconqueratdawn) and [dreamwidth](https://weconqueratdawn.dreamwidth.org/)).
> 
> I also write my own fiction which you can learn more about [here](https://www.louskelton.com/).


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